Prosenoder's Cup 2018 (personal)

He drinks from the cup, tentatively at first but then gulping with intent. The metal clatters across the ground. The tablelegs grow fur. The reliefs on the wall fade into nothing; faces of fear and resolve become curiosity and awe before draining to islands, to edges, to points. Everything crackles but the drapes: they are singing. Impossible lightbeams nudging sinuous purple and black. The table is hiding in the corner, shaking. A grain of salt falls from its edge to the floor. When it lands the floor erupts in green flame, a goose flying at ten meters per second into his eardrums. Feathers come to rest on the window sill. The drapes are blowing but the feathers do not move. The floorboards are buckling, their nails' complaints resonating until they pop from their hundred year homes. The table is kneeling. The flames are so bright that the expressions come back into the walls, the paper twirling flowers in their hair, eyebrows crooked, pupils searching. He vomits and the vines are reaching up from the chair to tickle his arms, he must force himself to breathe because his brainstem is too busy dancing with the fairies on the flametongue edges. And the wallmen have gone to dance among the trees, shouting with leaves in their hair and slapping their thighs, and pointing to the fire and throwing their heads back. The crickets are all in a line, a great circle of chitinous magick, marching up from the earth and back down into it. And the moon breaks through the sky, and the sound of it is more than there are hairs on the back of his neck, as he reaches up toward his face.